June 2012 BD Purchase

 

I haven’t been updating my blog for quite a while now. Trying to catch up a little when I got time…

So for June, I got a bunch of discs, all from Bestbuy. They were running promotions on steelbooks (bottom pic) plus providing vouchers for the Dark Night Rises movie.

May 2012 Blu-ray Taiwan Imports

 

So for May, I got Fate Stay Night the movie (Unlimited Blade Works) Taiwan BD-BOX LE, this is my first time getting a TW version Blu-ray Disc, turns out that the packaging is pretty sweet, especially for the price (under $30). It includes a collector’s box and a 132 page storyboard sketch.

As for the Gamera 3, it’s the US version. It’s just a cheap filler to get free shipping from the online vendor…

Mar 2012 Blu-ray Japan Imports

 

Besides some R1 DVD purchases, in March I also imported some Blu-rays from Japan.
They are:
1. Macross Zero Blu-ray Disc BOX
2. Card Captor Sakura Movie 1
3. Zone 10 years later Live

I’ve always wanted the Macross Zero, and finally got it. The exchange rate made it not so attractive compared to several years ago when it’s first released though. For Card Captor Sakura, I had no idea Bandai was bundling with a cellphone strap for the initial release. Had I known that, I would have picked up both movies instantly. Too bad the second movie with the cellphone strap bundle has sold out already, I’m unlikely to complete this collection. BTW, it’s the first Blu-ray in my collection with a pink case!

And lastly for Zone, yeah my first Blu-ray concert purchase. Zone always holds a special place in my heart, so I know I have to get this one. Although the release was only 1080i video with LPCM 2.0 audio and pretty heavily compressed with Japanese standards (4.5hr with 20Mbps avg bitrate).

Mar 2012 DVD R1 Purchase

 

A bit late, but here are some R1 DVDs (all anime) I got from March…

Got the first heat guy J box since the previous 7 disc collection doesn’t come with this limited edition box. Now this one is finally complete.

 

The IGPX box is very unique that the box has soft padding on it… It comes with a T-shirt.

And finally my first anime steelbook collection, although it’s a DVD steelbook… The Japanese BD Haruhi movie was too expensive to pick up so I gave it up.

Jan 2012 BD Purchase

 

Beginning of 2012, I thought I wouldn’t make another BD purchase for quite some time in preparation for the May’s Macross BD-BOX set. But eventually I still made an order…

I don’t like this movie since I never played the game. But it comes with a free movie ticket and the BD itself is cheap enough…

Matrix has been my fifth purchase now, first bootleg VCD, then US release DVD, HD-DVD (sold), 10th Anniversary digibook, and now the complete collection.

Pictures taken from PlayBook (waiting for OS 2.0 patiently), therefore they are a bit noisy.

Dec 2011 BD and DVD Purchase (Back to Anime?)

 

 

OK, I have to eat my words here. After bought Samurai 7 Blu-ray Box on launch, I pretty much vowed to never purchase a BD from FUNimation again. But here it goes, I just bought Basilisk and Samurai Champloo due to cheap prices. Basilisk is housed in a thin box with two Blu-ray cases, a step down from the three cases from Samurai 7. Despite it being a Veridian release, it doesn’t have the stupid Veridian label on the box and case. SONY PCL has released this title in Japan, with it’s own upscale, not sure how that looks. This one though has the standard modified English credits on openings and endings which I can never appreciate, especially on these historical titles.

 

 

Samurai Champloo, it’s a new transfer from the SD master (as indicated on the slip cover) that’s released recently. The packaging is a further step down from Basilisk. It’s three disc housed in a single BD case with a slip cover. Japan has released the same discs, but with a booklet and sold it for the standard premium price.

 

 

For DVDs, I finally got all the Eureka Seven limited edition boxes thanks to the clearance sale from Rightstuf (maybe a permanent price?). The conditions of these LE boxes are pretty good, but do take a grain of salt as they are from bargain bin. And to make free shipping, I bought the Heat Guy J DVD-BOX as a “filler”. It came with two boxes which is a surprise. I don’t know much about this series, but it’s from Director Akane Kazuki, which I liked his works (Escaflowne, Noein, and Tetsuwan Birdy).

 

The packaging is pretty nice. It’s three volumes housed in a plastic reinforced box, and four volumes housed in a standard heavy chipboard box. When all volumes are in the boxes, you can see the heat guy J’s face on the spine. The only problem is that there’s no volume number on the spine, the only way to tell the order is by product code at the bottom I guess. And it’s 26 episode (25+1 special) on seven discs.

Well, a summary for 2011: I haven’t bought a lot of discs this year, most are just unplanned random purchases due to price. Macross Frontier Movie 2 LE box certainly became THE MOST EXPENSIVE purchase I’ve made for one disc. Other memorable purchase would be Rurouni Kenshin OVA BD, which is one of my favorite OVA. I’m looking forward to 2012, hopefully there will be more worthwhile releases from Japan, particularly looking forward to any Macross BD releases.

Nov 2011 BD Purchase (BD, Games, and BF)

 

It’s November, not much is going on for the BF this year. I still haven’t got what I really wanted, but got some unexpected stuff – BlackBerry PlayBook, which is pretty good device. Back to BD collection, I made two purchases this month.

 

 

Pulp Fiction was one of the golden box item from Amazon. And the price for Tom Cruise BD collection seems right, so I got it, always wanted an upgrade for Minority Report. Too bad they didn’t include the extras disc for the movie, but $20 for 5 movies seems a decent price, what more can you ask for…

 

 

The case is a 5 disc case. There’s no disc art, each disc came with this boring gray looking label. But it’s better than I expected, at least it’s not the stupid green case, or a stack pack. 

 

 

I’ve also made some impulse purchases on games:

 

Star Wars Force Unleashed II, this is my first game in a steelbook case, although the artwork seems a bit simple. It also comes with a 2GB USB flash drive which I’ll never use… And the promotional PSN item has already expired on 10/31/2011. Another reason for Bestbuy to dump these I guess. I thought this game is a 2D/3D fighting game, but it turns out to be a Ratchet Clank Action Adventure game.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Civilization V, another collector’s edition Bestbuy was trying to dump at a good price. It’s totally worth it just for the art book, the OST, and the 5 metal toys. Actually I think it’s worth more than Star Wars Force Unleashed II.

 

 

And lastly I finally got uncharted 2.

Oct 2011 BD Purchase Part 2 – Macross Frontier Movie 2 Sayonara No Tsubasa マクロスF 恋離飛翼~サヨナラノツバサ~

 

 

So after waiting patiently for two weeks, I finally got my Macross movie 2 Collector’s Edition.

At 10,000 Yen, approx. $140 for this box, it’s absolutely THE most expensive Blu-ray box I’ve ever spent, and it’s only for a single movie (oh, well, a game too).

The collector’s edition has more external bonuses, all the first and second row items are bonuses for this Hybrid special edition. If you buy the regular edition, you only get the bottom row stuff, which is the movie itself and a box. I think it’s worth the extra $40 for the special edition.



The movie itself comes with a 48 page booklet and a box, same as last movie – Itsuwari no utahime (false songstress). Movie spec is 1080p 24fps video, LPCM 2.0 and DTS-HD MA 5.1, same as last time. It came with the game Macross Last Frontier. Unlike the movie’s bundle with the Macross Trial Frontier, I think this is actually a full game. The game play is about the same, but it has some ground fighting inside MF islands mimicking the scenes from the movies. There are quite a few trophies, but it’s a lot harder to get unlike in Trial Frontier.

Now moving on to bonuses for special edition. First you get the 原画 Original Drawing (60 total) collection and Blu-ray jacket posters (37 total) collection.

You also get the AR script books, print out ones. Each one has over 500 pages. This is a big reason I chose the special edition.

And you get the shrink sized pamphlets they gave away during the movies. I’m not sure how big the original is, but these are decent booklets. It’s a bargain for the movie goers, considering the ticketing price in Japan isn’t significantly higher than the ever increasing US prices…

Last thing for the physical goods is the film strip, I have a little better luck this time. I got Cathy Glass with Bobby standing on Macross Quarter’s bridge.

Aside from all these physical goods, you also get redeemable code for two exclusive PS3 themes. Of course you need a Japanese PSN account. The themes are poorly made IMO, icons are very repetitive and not complete.

Now putting the two movies side by side.



The big box is designed to hold both movies. And it does fit everything as you can see.

Aug 2011 BD Purchase – Rurouni Kenshin OVA Tsuiokuhen

 

 

Thanks for Aniplex US to import this, otherwise we would have to pay far more than $65 due to currency conversion issue.

 

It’s pretty much the Japanese edition plus an English translated booklet. The booklet is not as fancy as the original Japanese one, but gets the job done I guess. The packaging is digipak, and arranged from right to left. The spec includes 1080p 4:3 video, LPCM, DTS-HD 5.1, and English DTS.

 

June 2011 Blu-ray Purchase - Back to the future with Delorean bundle and its case

 

 

I got this from Amazon for $24.99. Not too shabby, although there’s better price as of this writing. The one I got is with the hotwheel Delorean 2011 model.

 

 

 

I guess the package is what the so-called older ones with shorter size? The discs come with digi-pak. The disc holders is yet another new creative type. It took me 10 minutes to figure out the correct way to handle these…

 

The disc holder has 3 fixed spots to hold the disc, there’s no traditional center button to push, instead you get two clip thing at the bottom. You need to use your index finger to hold the center of the disc, then push the disc against these two clips and lift the disc up. It’s another bad packaging, I never like digi-pak in the first place anyway. But it’s better than Fox’s Planet of the Apes 40th anniversary packaging (This one is from Universal). I haven’t decided if I should transfer these 6 discs to the 6-disc empty case I bought earlier. Digital copies are pretty much useless to me. If I ever need a copy, I would rather rip the disc and encode myself.

April 2011 BD purchase – Disney!

 

I think it’s been a while I have purchased any Blu-rays. But here we go, it’s Disney this time, and specifically old titles. I’ve been slowly collecting Disney Blu-ray lately, my goal is to have the older, pre-digital ones as much as possible; I don’t have much interest in the digital ones such as recent release the incredibles, and others (cars, etc). For the ones that’s already released, I think I missed Up which I’m definitely have to have it someday…

Dec 2010 BD Purchase – impulse buy

 

    

Not much going on in December, didn’t plan to buy any BDs anyway since I got plenty stuff to watch… But the two limited editions from bestbuy is hard to resist… I got these 2 for cheap due to their price error. Hellboy II, I got hellboy I, watched it, didn’t really get into it, I hope II be at least watchable. Coraline seems quite similar in style with Tim Burton’s Corpse Bride from the Free 5 disc offer back in the days. Coraline has at least four releases now, one regular BD, one LE, one anaglyph 3D, and now a true 3D is the most recent one, the one I got here is the LE gift set version with both the 2D and anaglyph 3D

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2010 Black Friday Purchase

 

Time to update on what’s bought for this Black Friday. Not much either for this year. It’s actually the first year that we didn’t wake up at 4AM and go into the lines. I got up at 9AM that day and went out to buy a couple stuff, which most of the items are still in stock. Granted they aren’t THE popular stuff like TV, notebook, etc…

So here are what I got:

A Samsung BT headset, my staples rewards is about to expire, so I got this… I actually made two staples online purchases with a seagate 1TB expansion drive, and a camera bundle. The camera gets cancelled though… Next is the Logitech mouse from office depot. I’m pretty impressed with the new Logitch lines with these mini receivers. They got great range unlike the older ones which totally sucked and required in line of sight. Then it’s the SIIG AC adapter for notebook. The Toshiba notebook we got last year had a malfunctioned adapter, so we exchanged the adapter within warranty with Toshiba acclaim without problem (one incident is Toshiba charged my credit card for original price of $134 even though I returned the broken one within 30 days, but a call solved the problem). And this SIIG AC adapter is only $10 after rebate… It seeams I got lots of SIIG product lately from sound card, notebook cooler, to keyboard… Last one out of this photo is the ASUS DVD writer. It is the first SATA DVD writer I got. My old SONY ATA one is dying, so this is a good replacement, hopefully it can last long enough before I got my first Blu-ray writer…

These are got from the next day, Saturday, which turns out have a better deal than Friday (more attractive). There’s also the Fujitsu i3 I reviewed earlier on sale for $400 which is a great deal, but I opt out since I want to assemble an i7 desktop in the near future (just wait for the memory to come down a bit further!) The SIIG card reader takes four drives which I don’t like, otherwise it’s decent enough with a dedicated microSD (TF) slot. The Trio 8GB 7” mp4 player WAS a steal at only $20. But it’s going back to store, since yesterday I can’t power this sh*t on! Called the manufacture, support guy suspects the battery is out, which I only had it for two weeks?? How unreliable is this… Lessons learned, never get unnamed brand… Last is the HDMI 1.4 cable with ethernet built-in. This was much better than the HDMI 1.3 cables I got last year from cablesunlimited.

So that’s pretty much what I got for this year.

Next are the entertainment stuff. There are MANY crazy prices for Blu-ray boxsets this year. The price/disc is even better than the end of 2007 when SONY defeats Toshiba’s HD-DVD. Anyway, I got the following, six movies for less than $40 after tax:

And lastly, the order in Sept from Sony rewards has been cancelled by me since I got the move bundle from Amazon:

I got tired waiting for Sony, since Amazon’s price is not too bad, I went ahead and placed order, got it within 3 days instead of endless waiting. Now just have to wait for Sony to reimburse the purchase by using my rewards points I got way back when I purchased my Playstation 3!